HISTORY OF AIR WARRIOR (by Brooke)
Air Warrior started as a program written by Kelton Flynn back
when he was working on his Ph.D. (in nuclear engineering or
physics, as I recall). It didn't bear much resemblance to the
Air Warrior of today -- you'd type in maneuvers for your plane;
your opponent would type in maneuvers for his plane; the computer
would crunch some numbers and come up with new plane positions;
and so on. It was played over terminals on the school's
mainframe. Kelton got a lot more interested in this and decided
after graduation (along with one of his pals -- I think it was
John Taylor) to found a company to produce a multi-player flight
sim. So Kesmai was formed, and Air Warrior was conceived.
Kesmai started out with all of a couple of employees.
To implement Air Warrior, Kesmai hooked up with GEnie, a new
on-line service at the time. Air Warrior came out in 1987 and
was the first multi-player combat flight simulator (at least
outside of the military). Back then it cost $10 or $12 per hour
to play and was available only for Macintoshes. That was in the
days when Macs had the little nine-inch black-and-white screens
and no joysticks. Still, I remember what a blast it was to find
such a thing in those days: an honest-to-God multi-player combat
flight sim!
That first version of Air Warrior was pretty rough by today's
standards. The frame rate was low (perhaps a handful of frames
per second, depending on which type of computer you had), rough
black-and-white graphics, bullets that flew on laser-beam
straight paths, and wacky bugs (like being able to climb to the
stratosphere as long as your plane was climbing while inverted).
But there was nothing else like it out there. Keep in mind that
Air Warrior was out only a handful of years after the original
Flight Simulator by Bruce Artwick of SubLogic, when the best
PC-based flight sims in the world didn't have much more than Air
Warrior in the way of graphics and had no multi-player component
at all. For people like me -- raving WWII aviation enthusiasts
-- this was a dream come true.
As the years chugged on, the Air-Warrior program was refined
(adding more realistic gunnery and getting rid of flight-dynamics
bugs), and the program was ported to the Atari and Amiga
computers. Of course, folks at Kesmai knew that they were
missing a big market in the PC and announced their plans for a
DOS-based EGA version for the PC. Jeez, did that ever start the
comments flowing on GEnie's Air-Warrior message boards. Lots of
people were concerned that the PC folks would swarm into the
arenas, flooding the arenas to overflowing with dweebs who didn't
know how to fly. There would go the neighborhood. Maybe it was
a little like that at first (not as much challenge for the old
folks), but then the PC folks learned the ropes just like
everyone else had, and the game had more participants, which
added to the fun.
Scenarios were also introduced into the mix of fun. Pioneered by
guys like Doktor Gonzo (or "Dok"), these were battles set up with
definite objectives and resources. To me, playing in a
historical scenario gave the same feeling I got when reading
about real WWII air combat. To me, scenarios seemed like a whole
new level of fun in Air Warrior.
But then came the "stagnant" years. Kesmai continued to make
minor refinements, but some people had been asking for more
realism or more features for a long time, and Kesmai wasn't
giving much feedback. Previously, Kesmai had given lots of
feedback and had talked to the players a lot about proposed
improvements and new versions. Without the feedback, a lot of us
figured that Air Warrior was stagnating, that Kesmai was more
interested in producing other games that perhaps brought in more
money. A lot of the old timers thought that this was the
beginning of the end for Air Warrior, the start of a slow decline
into obscurity.
What we didn't know was that Kesmai was working on a vastly
improved version, the SVGA version for DOS. Besides much higher
resolution and better graphics, it would have most of the realism
features that had asked for over the years: stalls, spins,
blackouts, etc. There would be accompanying changes in the
on-line arenas. Kesmai hadn't talked about it at all, though,
because they were tired of the players constantly asking, "When
will it be out? You said it would be out in two weeks. It's
past two weeks, so when will it be out, huh? When?" That gets
old very fast during a development process.
So, to the surprise of many, Kesmai came out with the new SVGA
version, which fairly closely resembled the versions available
today. The Mac version was updated, too. About that time, the
Atari ST and Amiga were declining into obscurity, and Kesmai
dropped their support for those platforms. SVGA Air Warrior,
with its up-to-date features, generated some interest from the
retail market, and Kesmai entered into a deal to market it in
stores. Unfortunately, that petered out due (it seemed to me) to
poor distribution on the part of the distribution company (not
Kesmai) and to a game that was not tailored to the ham-fisted "I
want eye candy" arcade-game crowd (which seems larger than the
rabid "I want realism" WWII air-combat-enthusiast crowd).
However, this blip on the retail market might have contributed to
Air Warrior being noticed by a Japanese company. The company
invested a bit in Air Warrior, paying for the addition of artwork
and data sets for some of the Japanese planes. At any rate,
things were back to humming along in Air Warrior.
The Air-Warrior Training Academy started sometime around 1993 or
1994. A bunch of the veteran players, knowing how steep the
learning curve was for Air Warrior, wanted to help new players
get up to speed more quickly. Also, Kesmai entered into deals
with two other on-line services -- Delphi and CRIS -- to offer
Air Warrior. Players liked this because it introduced some price
competition into the mix. GEnie had already dropped its on-line
charges from $10-$12/hour to $6/hour. Now, with the extra
competition, it went to something like $3/hour. I think that
Kesmai was finally starting to make some money, too, because it
hired a lot more people, many of them from the ranks of avid
Air-Warrior players.
So, the Training Academy was up and running. Air Warrior was
running on GEnie, Delphi, and CRIS. Scenarios were humming
along. The cost for Air Warrior declined to $2/hour and less.
Things were great. And then, in 1996, they got even better,
although in an erratic way. Kesmai made a deal with CompuServe,
America Online, and Earthlink to offer Air Warrior on their
services; and GEnie, long the most popular spot for Air Warrior,
pretty much went belly up (due, in my opinion, to very poor
management and to being far behind the technology curve).
Overall, Kesmai now had a much larger market because of the size
of America Online and CompuServe, but for a couple of reasons,
there was a lot of disruption in late 1996 and early 1997.
First, the demise of GEnie as THE place for Air Warrior caused a
scattering of the Air-Warrior community and a momentary halt in
scenarios and the Training Academy. It was sad to see all of the
old timers scattering to the winds, and some seemed to drift off
altogether during this time of change. (Sniff, sniff.) There
was even another Air-Warrior-like product out there: ICI's
WarBirds, written in part by Air-Warrior veterans HiTech,
Caligula, and Pyro. This drew off some Air-Warrior players, too,
but competition is a very good thing for us consumers. Second,
Kesmai rapidly developed successive new versions of Air Warrior
that, because of improvements, were incompatible with other
versions; and Kesmai dropped some of the older versions. During
1996, they released Air Warrior for Windows, Air Warrior for
Windows 95, and a corresponding beta version for the Macintosh.
In January, 1997, they dropped support for SVGA Air Warrior and
the SVGA-style Mac version. In late February, 1997, they
released Air Warrior II for Windows 95.
The incompatibilities lead to a fragmentation of the Air-Warrior
universe. The current situation is that there are four separate
sets of arenas: one set for Air Warrior II on Delphi, Earthlink,
and CompuServe; one for Air Warrior for Windows on Delphi,
Earthlink, and CompuServe; one for Air Warrior for Windows on
America Online; and one for the beta version of Air Warrior for
the Mac. Thus, users on Delphi, Earthlink, and CompuServe who
use Air Warrior II can play together in a scenario; but people
using Air Warrior for Windows, Air Warrior for the Mac, or
playing on America Online can't participate in the same scenario
since their arenas are separate.
Still, despite such fragmentation, the future of Air Warrior
looks brighter than ever mainly because popularity is higher than
ever. I think that Kesmai is finally starting to make a decent
amount of money from Air Warrior -- and more money encourages
more development. Air Warrior II is out and selling in stores;
the Air-Warrior Training Academy is getting back up to speed; war
nights are up and running; and I hear rumors of more frequent
scenarios. I hope that a new Air-Warrior community will form
around the "alt.games.air-warrior" newsgroup, where people can
participate no matter which arenas they fly in.
So, after writing all of this, after having thought back to those
days a decade ago when first I took to Air Warrior's virtual
skies, I am left with many thoughts. Three stand out: first,
that Air Warrior has progressed so far over the years; second,
that compared to the old days, Air Warrior is so cheap to play;
and third, that if it had been this way back in 1987, I never
would have graduated.
